Difference Navigation

There are two very useful methods for navigating the differences detected by UltraCompare when two files are compared: the View Next Difference and View Prev Difference buttons on the toolbar and the graphical navigation mapshown to the left of the compare panes.

Clicking on the View Next Difference button or pressing F3 will position the cursor at the next difference in the active compare and clicking on the View Prev Difference or pressing F4 will position the cursor at the last difference previous to the current cursor position in the active compare. These give the user an easy method for stepping through differences sequentially without having to manually search them out. These are available for navigation of all differences including Text Compares, Binary (smart) Compares, Binary (fast) Compares, and Directory Compares.

In Text Compare Mode, when the active line is part of a block of differenced text, the user may press F7 to move to the next difference within the block and F8 to move to the previous difference within the block.

The graphical navigation map is displayed to the left of the compare panes during Text Compares. By default this is displayed in scrollable mode. If you prefer, you may click on the Scalable Map / Scrollable Map toggle in the View menu to switch to a scalable rather than scrollable navigation map. In this mode the differences are represented for the entirety of both compared files rather than shown as a scrollable map.

Matching sections of the compared files are indicated by white blocks in the navigation map. Sections where differences occur are indicated (by default) with blue blocks. Double clicking on the graphical navigation map will position the compared files accordingly. This allows very quick point-to-point navigation within the files rather than sequentially stepping through differences and also presents a quick overview of the number of differences between compared files. The red rectangle displayed within this space represents the visible portion of the files being compared.